An agile leader must be flexible and nimble to foresee change on the horizon, anticipate what is coming, and be ready to develop strategies to respond to constantly evolving market needs.

Just like the conductor of an orchestra, the successful leader gives first one section its voice, then another section, and allows for disruptions and changes of rhythm and intensity. Finally, the leader brings together all the disparate strands into one voice.

As I explain in this Share Radio Interview with Sue Dougan, we are living in a world of VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. The only constant is change. There is no single way. Success lies in the collaboration and shared perspectives of many diverse teams.

Conductor directing symphony orchestra with performers on background.

 

Just like a conductor of the orchestra learns how to give cues to the other sections, great agile leaders learn how to develop mental and emotional agility. They leverage personal, cultural and generational differences in their teams and organizations.

They model behaviors like continuous learning, readiness to change, and looking for answers and talent in unexpected places.

You cannot hope to succeed in your home workplace, across borders and globally, if you do not become an agile conductor – listening, observing, being curious, sharing and combining other perspectives.

Lean in to hear Sue and I discuss:

How I learned agile leadership on my global explorations

The power of the exploring decision, saying yes to different ways of doing things

Accepting your own vulnerability as a step towards greater strength

Coaching emerging and global leaders – a symphony of styles

Musical interludes from the Renaissance to Pet Shop Boys and back again!

Leadership in The Age of Pluralism

To discover more about the VUCA world, check out my new book The Age of Pluralism: Global Intelligence for Emerging Leaders: http://davidcliveprice.com/age-of-pluralism

You can discover more about coaching agile leaders at http://davidcliveprice.com/coaching

And to learn more about in-depth executive coach training, schedule a call here

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Great leaders ask great questions. That is the art of global leadership.

Above all, they ask them of themselves and they pivot many times with the answers they receive.

There is no one set way. In these rapidly changing times, great leaders learn how to develop mental and emotional agility. They leverage personal, cultural and generational differences in their teams and organizations.

You cannot hope to succeed in your home workplace, across borders and globally, if you do not cultivate the art of global leadership – listening, observing, being curious, sharing other perspectives.

One of the best ways to build successful relationships and partnerships is by creating trust – and for that you need to put yourself in the place of others.

Check out my recent chat with educational leader Lily Sanabria, host of the Master Leadership Podcast, about how to develop your ‘muscle of the mind’ to thrive in The Age of Pluralism.

Why Becoming ‘Bamboo Strong’ Can Transform Your Success As a Global Leader

Lean in to hear us discuss:

How leadership begins with the courage to look within

The power of the exploring decision, saying yes to different ways of doing things

Accepting your own vulnerability as a step towards greater strength

Coaching emerging and global leaders – the pipeline

How to measure your progress in international business

Steve Jobs take on ‘round pegs in square holes’ and ‘the crazy ones’

Avoiding the pitfall of the stuck culture through growth mind-set and agility

Learning to lead successful teams rather than tribes

And more

Discover How To Achieve Global Leadership in The Age of Pluralism

You can learn more about Bamboo Strong Global Coaching at http://davidcliveprice.com/coaching.

If you’d like help to master the art of global leadership that truly inspires, contact me at [email protected] – I’ll be delighted to hear from you.

 

The post Mastering The Art of Global Leadership – Podcast appeared first on David Clive Price.

The post Mastering The Art of Global Leadership – Podcast appeared first on David Clive Price.

If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the way to everyone’s cultural intelligence is down the same route.

The process of globalisation, rapid travel, and 24/7 connectivity has brought the different cuisines of the world, and the cultures that created them, much closer to our everyday life.

When I was a young man in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the national cuisine was a mono-cultural, ‘meat and veg’ sort of thing.

I remember my excitement to be taken to a Bengali restaurant in central London from my suburban south London town and finding the whole experience (mixed with a visit to the theatre to see The Merchant of Venice) incredibly exotic.

Even when studying at Cambridge, the only foreign food available was in a curry house at the back of my college and a Greek moussaka place in nearby Green Street.

It was a big effort to find an espresso bar in London, and the bewildering range of coffee choices (pistachio and rose mocha, anyone?) now available in every coffee bar would have been unimaginable.

EMPIRE OF THE CUISINES 

Nowadays, when I watch UK MasterChef on television, I find myself struggling to recognise some of the ingredients from cuisines all over the world, often fused together artfully on one plate for a particular course: Lebanese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Caribbean, Polish, Italian, French, and many more.

The confidence with which the competing amateur chefs handle Japanese fish roe, or Indian sambal, or Malaysian coconut and lime leaves makes my eyes—and especially my mouth—water.

No longer do you have to take yourself to Paris for fine dining. The cuisines of the world are available in cities from Singapore and Tokyo to London, from Buenos Aires to New York and Los Angeles.

And it’s not only fine dining.

Street versions and family versions (the Italian cucina della mamma) are available too. As our cities become more and more of a multicultural hot pot, we are learning more about different cultures of the world through what the people of those cultures eat, where they find it, how they prepare it, how they eat it, and how they reflect on it.

If we are what we eat, it’s pretty clear we are becoming ever more multi- cultural.

FLEXING OUR CULTURAL MUSCLES

This has big implications for developing our cultural intelligence – whether to work more successfully in global teams, develop closer relationships with local partners and customers, align cultures following corporate mergers, or simply perform better in the new global economy.

Indeed, the first benefit for our cultural intelligence is that when we try out a new cuisine, or new dishes within that cuisine, we are in effect flexing a cultural ‘muscle of the mind’.

We are asking ourselves to step over into some other taste region—maybe unfeasibly spicy, maybe cooked in a strange wine or paste, maybe featuring meats, or fish, or vegetables that we have never tried before.

The point is that we are experimenting, taking a bold leap of faith (can you tolerate a red Thai curry?), and some part of us is probably also wondering how the inhabitants of this country— Slovenia, the Maldives, Peru—came up with this dish.

That’s because cuisine is in many ways culture.

A couple of decades ago, I published a book on Korean cuisine together with the chefs of the Shilla Hotel in Seoul. They provided the recipes, the public relations department provided the fantastic photos of each dish, and I provided the essays on South Korea’s different regions, how the dishes developed, and their historical and cultural background.

What do you think when you hear the words ‘Korean food’? You probably go straight to the stereotype: meat barbecue. Koreans eat a lot of meat, so their main dish is spicy grilled beef, right?

Wrong!

It’s true that the Koreans are descended from Mongol horsemen who hunted animals on the steppes of Russia and in China. The Mongols sliced up their prey on concave metal shields, which they held over open wood fires.

And so to this day Kor[...]

Did you know that the very dense fibres in each cane of bamboo give the plant extreme flexibility, allowing it to bend without snapping? In earthquakes, a bamboo forest is actually a very safe place to take shelter, and houses made of bamboo have been known to withstand 9.0-magnitude quakes.

That’s why for thousands of years bamboo has been the go-to building material for most of the world. Some scientists believe that if bamboo were planted on a mass scale it could completely reverse the effects of global warming in less than a decade. It would also provide a renewable source of food, building material, and erosion prevention.

THE POWER OF BAMBOO

Bamboo is clocked as the fastest-growing plant on Earth. Some species have been measured to grow over 4 feet in 24 hours. A pole of bamboo can regenerate to its full mass in just six months!

I personally witnessed the extraordinary power of the bamboo in the Tuscan valley where I lived and worked. Every time I chopped down a bamboo cane, the same day small green shoots of a new bamboo would appear in the very same spot. This constant regeneration made me marvel at the strength of nature.

I believe that cultural intelligence has a similar power to grow and change the world. In the thickets of stereotype, indifference, and blind hatred that we see all around us, it is the green shoots of cultural understanding, rapport, and sympathy that have the greatest chance of transforming the globe’s political and spiritual ecosystem.

WE CAN ALL CHANGE  

We are living in a period of extreme migrations, of innocent refugees fleeing from political violence, of homelessness, and poverty, and inequality. People are crossing borders in flight from terrorist groups, from unemployment, and from injustice in numbers that are throwing up isolationists and protectionists as never before.

Xenophobia is on the march in many countries of the world. There was a strong undercurrent of it in the campaign for Britain’s exit from the European Union, and incidents of racial hatred have multiplied in Britain since the vote to leave the EU.

The drumbeat of cultural intolerance and isolationism has also been heard in the US, encouraging stereotypes of Mexicans and Muslims, among other groupings. Right-wing political parties have continued to expand their reach in European countries on an anti-immigration and nationalist platform.

And yet, and yet…

LEST WE FORGET

America is home to some of the most multicultural cities and states in the world. London has a Muslim mayor, voted for Remain, and is a vibrant and dynamic multicultural city, as are Birmingham and other British cities. However much the vote for Brexit in Britain was fuelled by frustration and a sense of powerlessness against the tide of globalisation, there is no reversing that tide.

It is ironic, but also a reason for celebration that Britain will now have to use all its intercultural expertise and historical experience to relate and negotiate better with European countries, with emerging markets like India and China, and to reconcile its own communities if it is to prosper after leaving the EU.

The ‘soft skills’ of cross-cultural and global leadership will be required even more, both in its cities and provinces, in its relations with Scotland and Ireland, and with individual European countries.

Rather than reversing the wave of globalisation, leaders will have to ride that wave.  This means showing more understanding and empathy for local regions, for smaller cultures, for individual differences. The world is not a global village…although it may appear so. The more global we are, the more we must think locally.

AGE OF COOPERATION

We are also living in an age of unprecedented international and multilateral cooperation. Businesses and not-for-profit organisations, educational institutions, and government agencies are collaborating in ways that are unique in history.

As the process of globalisation continues, bringing with it special challenges for in[...]

Diversity is the new normal and we’d better get used to it! We are living and working in an age of rapid change: increasing globalisation and connectivity, faster time to market, more cross-border mergers and acquisitions, many new and more accessible markets, and greater mobility of workforces and teams.

Even thirty years ago, we would have been able to more or less predict whom our business partners, suppliers, distributors, customers, bosses, work colleagues, and team members would be. We would have expected to interact with them safe in the certainty that most of them would be People Like Us.

Nowadays, these certainties are gone. Under the impact of migration, globalisation, and the concentration of work in super-connected cities across the world, we are dealing with people of many different national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational backgrounds on a daily basis.

This means we are now required to develop and use a once neglected skill—cultural intelligence—as never before. The good news is that cultural intelligence can be discovered and forged into a powerful capability for success in the new global economy. Two decades of research by scholars in dozens of countries have contributed to the evolution of the cultural intelligence (CQ)* model, a simple and clear four-part system for approaching culturally diverse situations and the challenges of cross-cultural encounters.

I have written Bamboo Strong as a very personal exploration of the CQ model and its four capabilities—CQ Drive, CQ Knowledge, CQ Strategy, and CQ Action. Each of the central chapters takes as its reference point one of the four aspects of the CQ model as laid out in the excellent studies and publications of the Cultural Intelligence Center, LLC, based in Michigan, Illinois.

GLOBAL LEADERSHIP STARTS WITH YOU

But I also believe that, beyond the systematic application and development of cultural intelligence, the real driver for success in today’s globalised world is you. In other words, it’s your own pliancy, adaptability, readiness to learn and to empathise. Cultural intelligence and global leadership start with the personal—with how you see yourself in different cultural situations, how much awareness you have of your own culture, and how it affects your thinking and behavior.

This book is intended to both motivate and inspire you rather than dull you with facts or extensive lists of behaviour. Throughout my life, I’ve been very fortunate and privileged to travel, live, and work in many countries around the globe.

I’ve married into families from two cultures that are very different to my own. I’ve had a rich variety of diverse occupations from academic to wine and olive farmer, to novelist, travel writer, international speechwriter and speaker, senior leadership mentor, and global strategist.

But this does not necessarily make me unique. The fact is, many of us are now global citizens of a world where multicultural diversity exists right on our doorstep and in all aspects of our lives, from going to the gym to shopping to dining out to using social media.

THE CQ JOURNEY

I didn’t start off as a global citizen. I grew up in a very different environment of People Like Us, of safe certainties, of expected behaviour and social assumptions that were typical of an Anglo-Welsh, London-born, grammar school- and university-educated boy of the time.

It was only when I broke away from this background, and went to live with my first husband in Switzerland and Italy, that I discovered the elements of cultural intelligence that were to stand me in such good stead in my future life and career.

One of the central themes of this book is that you can only develop strong cultural intelligence if you are open to, and ready to learn from, cross-cultural experiences in real life. And the more of them you experience, the stronger your CQ will be.

I have made countless cultural mistakes and blunders in new cultural environments and when meeting new people from oth[...]

Yes, I know we’re not supposed to in this age of political correctness but how many times do we hear other people doing it, catch a hint of it on TV, and (god forbid) find ourselves consciously or sub-consciously doing it?

I mean stereotyping.

According to psychologists, stereotypes can be mental on an interpersonal level and social on an intergroup level. In other words, they reinforce assumptions and give relief. For that reason they are often defensive and negative.

That’s not always the case. Apparently we are very ambivalent in our stereotypes, and can show considerable warmth in our stereotypical admiration of closely allied groups.

We can also show instinctive, stereotypical envy of high status, competitive groups such as rich people and should I mention them, Asians?

ASIA STEREOTYPES

The stereotypes of the ‘impassive Japanese’ or the ‘Master of Kung Fu’ or ‘Inspector Wong’ have been replaced by a new set of stereotypes related to the wave of shoppers from China (previously Japan) in the luxury goods stores of the West waving their credit cards and buying up every Gucci and Louis Vuitton bag available.

According to our stereotype, these new Chinese are superficial big spenders, rapid learners and status-seekers, and now comprise the largest middle-class consumer market on earth.

South Koreans, pre-‘Gagnam style’, were once almost exclusively known for Samsung products, shipbuilding, a crazy northern neighbour, and a propensity for eating dogs. Hongkongers were supposed to be obsessed with money, Singaporeans were not allowed to spit or eat chewing gum. The list goes on.

Rightly or wrongly (largely wrongly), stereotypes about Asians are still current. And this despite the fact that East and Southeast Asia is made up of more than twenty countries, many of them with strong ethnic and regional differences, and almost all of them with a growing level of sophistication and education.

This entire population, more than a fifth of the world’s total, cannot be handled by stereotypes.

So if you are going to do business in any one of these twenty or so Asian Markets (or indeed in other global markets), here are three leadership questions to ask yourself:

1) Do I know anything about the country or am I assuming from what I’ve seen that it’s more or less Westernized by now and that if I need any help, others will do it for me?

The assumption behind this question is that wherever you go to do business in Asia, the standard for catching up will be a Western one.

In other words, you can pretty much get the lay of the land by relying on Western models of behaviour and everyone aspiring to those. That is a dangerous assumption.

2) Do I need anything other than the basic knowledge because, after all, the language of business is global? Just get the deal done.

The language of business is global, and often English, but that doesn’t mean that the ‘how’ of business, or even the ‘why’ of business, is the same from country to country or from culture to culture.

English is a second or even third language in many Asian countries, so you will often be partially excluded from conversations you want to follow.

It’s also likely that you come up against a whole network of obligations and loyalties that completely undermine your faith in a straightforward, rational, and Western way of doing business.

3) Should I be anything other than a figurehead? After all, the team is there for the longer term (or is local) and I’m a short-term expat/specialist on a ‘parachute’ trip. 

Very few leaders try to parachute into the Asian region any more, at least not on a regular basis, and having a local team is no excuse for not understanding and working together with that local team, which even in a small country like Singapore may well be made up of people of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

So anyone intending to develop business in Asia must get some sort of handle on the local and regional business cultures.

A figurehead from the West, or an expatriate who relies[...]

I have a Jewish-American composer friend who used to visit me when I lived in Switzerland, and on one occasion he came down to the farm I cultivated in Italy.

Frank is a lovely and highly intelligent man, with wide experience of travelling the world and, of course, working with people from many different backgrounds for his Broadway shows and musicals.

If there was one person I could think of as having both the drive to understand cultural differences and the broad knowledge of how people behave differently in other cultures it is Frank. He has even written musicals that portray the clash and partial resolution of these differences in thrilling and inspiring form.

However, when he came to Switzerland—and later to Italy—it always intrigued me that the usually very sharp-witted Frank was slightly off beam in the quick conclusions he drew from what he saw.

1. DON’T JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS

In Zürich, for example, Frank would be puzzled when he met a new group of Swiss people, each one of whom would take time to shake his hand and introduce themselves formally by giving their surnames, and expect him to do the same.

Frank always introduced himself with his Christian name. He also very rarely shook hands, preferring a pleasant smile and perhaps a joke to break the ice.

Seeing his hosts looking slightly uncomfortable with this manner of introduction, Frank immediately assumed that the Swiss were overly formal and ‘Germanic’.

I told him this was not the case: the hand-shaking and offering of surnames were just a Swiss way of showing healthy democratic respect for everyone present—not an example of Prussian coldness. But I’m not sure Frank was ever convinced.

It was the same when he visited our Tuscan valley. Frank used to observe that our farmer neighbours regularly left baskets of fresh vegetables and flowers outside our door at the end of the day. Sometimes they even hung a skinned, cleaned, and partially chopped rabbit in a plastic bag on a nail near the doorbell (out of reach of any interested dogs or cats).

He concluded from this that our neighbours would call in our debt to them at some future date. So much free produce, he reasoned, could not possibly come without some sort of strings attached.

2. LOOK MORE CLOSELY

Again, I had to explain to him that the giving of fresh vegetables was a normal reflex on the part of neighbours living in a communal, natural setting. We exchanged whatever we had that was extra to our needs because that was the way of the Italian countryside at the time.

You never knew what natural emergency could come along (we had severe snow one winter that blighted many of our olive trees). Being bound in mutual obligation to help each other out was an essential aspect of survival. It also meant that the good stuff didn’t go to waste.

However, try telling a seasoned New Yorker that gifts can be quite innocent and without obligation!

He was once standing beneath the loggia at the entrance to the farmhouse when one of our neighbours came by with a bundle of freshly cut artichokes and a basket of figs. I could hear Frank talking to the farmer and a disjointed discussion unfolding, in English and Italian, until I came along to smooth the whole thing over.

It wasn’t Frank’s fault. His city environment made him suspicious of unearned gifts. As I moved around the world to places where I didn’t feel as safe as I did in the Italian countryside, I caught echoes of Frank’s suspicions in my own reactions.

3. AVOID ASSUMPTIONS

In countries as diverse as Myanmar/Burma, the Philippines, Brazil, and Egypt, I assumed from very little evidence that I was being taken for a ride or being put into an awkward position by little gifts that simply came from the heart.

At such moments, I also rushed in with my assumptions—even though I was armed with plenty of cross-cultural experience. Instead of standing back a moment and reflecting on what I was being offered, or on the way it was being offered, I jumped to conclusions.

I suspec[...]

At the heart of many people’s difficulties with adapting to other cultures and mind-sets and ways of doing things lies fear. What kind of fear?

 

Fear of otherness; fear of making mistakes or a fool of yourself; fear that you may be missing out on what is really going on. It’s a common problem with many busy executives, expatriates, and business owners or entrepreneurs.

So what’s the answer?  Travel.

Many, if not all of the cross-cultural learning encounters I have experienced have been in a travelling context. Or at least in the context of relocation from a usual workplace or home environment to a place where the signposts are less familiar, where it’s necessary to interpret and learn how to respond to new cultural signals—and above all, to interact with people whose backgrounds may not be familiar.

THE JOURNEY IS WHAT COUNTS

Travel, of course, is meant to broaden the mind. But travel by itself is not necessarily enough to develop your cultural intelligence. It depends how you travel and what you take from the experience.

I may travel four times a year to Morocco or Cancun, but if I spend almost all my time at the hotel swimming pool, seeing expatriate friends for lunch and dinner, and rarely going beyond the hotel perimeter except perhaps in an organised sightseeing tour, I may return home more relaxed but with little sense that I have been somewhere completely different—or even different at all.

I have travelled like this—to the island of Phuket in Thailand, full of its expatriate enclaves and condominiums and yacht harbours. I found it difficult to experience anything of Thai daily life, or get any real sense that I was in Thailand, apart from the food in the hotel.

I am not a preacher for adventure travel, nor do I look down on those who travel just for the sake of sun, sand, and sangria with their friends. I have enjoyed holidays like this myself.

However, they have done nothing for increasing my confidence in cross-cultural situations, or for exercising that extra limb or middle eye, or whatever we want to call cultural intelligence.

 

 

PITCHING IN AND GETTING ON

For that—surprise, surprise—you have to interact with people from another culture, to experiment, to make mistakes, to have fun, and to generally squeeze everything you can from the world you are pitched into. Sometimes this means navigating situations you didn’t expect and for which you don’t have an inner guide.

You should welcome as many of these situations as possible. The longer you spend in new cultural surroundings (research suggests that more than year in each is of the greatest benefit), the more you will benefit in terms of confidence, problem-solving, and imaginatively putting yourself in the place of others.

Somehow your ear becomes attuned to other languages too, even if you don’t speak them, and your inner voice listens to what other people are saying—perhaps even about you—so that you end up modifying your behaviour and getting on better.

READING THE SIGNS

This attuning to the sounds, phrases, and body language of people in other cultures is one of our deepest instincts. Perhaps it’s because we don’t speak the language, or very little of it, that we find ourselves observing physical signs and responding with our own bodily or facial signals, hints, expressions of warmth or warning.

If we are always chatting amongst ourselves in English at the hotel swimming pool, it is unlikely that we will develop this essential part of our cultural intelligence. 

However, when we really travel, we learn a lot more about ourselves and about the new culture we are experiencing.

In business, this can be something as basic as not understanding why a Singaporean audience is staring at you with blank faces when you ask for questions at the end of your presentation.

Or it can be discerned in the slight facial tic and impassive expression of a Chinese counterpart when asked to reply yes or no to one of your contractual questions (as posed by yo[...]

Diversity is the new normal—and we’d better get used to it. Under the impact of migration, globalisation, and the concentration of work in super-connected cities across the world, we are dealing with people of many different national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational backgrounds on a daily basis.

This means we are now required to develop and use a once neglected skill—cultural intelligence (CQ)—as never before. And yet more than 90 per cent of global executives identify cross-cultural effectiveness as their biggest challenge.

HOW ABOUT YOU?

How about you? Are you one of the fortunate or culturally gifted 10 per cent? More likely, you are among the majority of people who feel their cultural intelligence is not quite as good as it should be.

Perhaps you’re leading or working with multicultural teams. Perhaps you have been assigned to a position overseas. Perhaps your business is becoming more international.  Whatever the reason, you have to start your cultural intelligence journey somewhere.

When I say ‘cultural intelligence journey’, I don’t mean that we are all more or less passengers bound in the same direction as soon as we consciously step on the CQ Express—and that we’re all going to end up at the same destination once we have crossed similar mountains, and rivers, and national borders, and cultural barriers.

THE CQ EXPRESS

We all respond differently to the challenges of this complex, cross-cultural world of ours, and each one of us is different and individual. We will have personal and individual reactions to different cultural settings and scenarios.

It is by no means certain where we will end up even when we have developed our cultural intelligence over many years and in many different situations. Your CQ Express might take you anywhere.

For some people—and these tend to be the majority—it is extremely difficult to function successfully when confronted with cultures and attitudes that are not very similar to their own.

Even when they are posted to other countries in their jobs, they often fail to adapt to the prevailing culture or to even set foot outside their own safe expatriate ghetto.

They want everyone they encounter to be ‘just like me’ and to do things ‘just like at home’. And when that doesn’t work out for them, they complain to their expatriate colleagues that they don’t ‘get’ the Chinese, or the Brazilians, or the Indians.

LISTS OF DOS AND DON’TS

They want a system that will enable them to interact safely with the locals, or people from the same region, without having to make any adjustments in their values or behaviour.

Lists of dos and don’ts are often the main support that such professionals use (if they use any), as if a quick rundown of etiquette tips will save them the painful business of overcoming cultural differences and communicating effectively.

This shopping list approach to cultural adjustment is perhaps better than making no effort at all. However, it is unlikely to work when you are confronted (as we all are, sometimes several times a day) by a multiplicity of different cultural situations—ethnic, generational, or organisational.

How do you handle the East Asia portfolio of clients you have been handed when you are told the Japanese are different to the South Koreans, who are different to the Mainland Chinese, who are different to the Taiwanese?

How do you avoid stereotypes when you rely on your etiquette tips and shopping lists? How do you treat a Japanese American differently to a Tokyo-born Japanese?

BECOMING CULTURALLY ADEPT

Don’t get me wrong. A list is an attempt at understanding or fitting in, but it won’t help you respond effectively to a variety of cultural contexts. You will become confused when trying to remember what to do when and in what culture. You will get cultural overload, and you will do what many stressed people do: say it’s all a waste of time, stick to your guns, and not bother.

This is a great shame because with a little help to flex your cultural[...]

Cultural understanding almost always starts with the personal—which means it starts with you.

Without a strong sense of who you are and how your own culture has influenced and shaped you, you are very unlikely to know how to respond to other cultures or have the confidence to modify your behaviour in the light of your discoveries.

We are all carrying around with us our own GHQ—a general headquarters that has early warning procedures, listening posts in other countries, advanced intelligence gathering, and direct channels to command-and-control decision making.

If you want to be an effective player in international or multicultural contexts, you need a highly developed personal GHQ of your own. The more information your GHQ processes as part of your natural curiosity, the more comparative intelligence you will gather and the sharper will be your response in new situations and to new challenges.

WHAT IS A PERSONAL GHQ?

An effective GHQ begins with a strong sense of yourself and how your own culture has influenced the way you see things. Only then can you have the confidence to adapt to the people and customs and expectations of a different culture.

I have a colleague named James, who saw action in the British army in the jungles of Malaysia, and when he retired from the army he was military attaché in various embassies in Southeast Asia.

He now works as a procurement specialist for the defence industry. James is fluent in the Bahasa Malay language and has been honoured for his services by the Malaysian government with the title of Dato (the equivalent of ‘Sir’).

Every time I meet James, I am impressed by his knowledge, not only of Southeast Asia in general but also by his understanding of how business works in that part of the world.

THE BEST LAID PLANS…

He often mentions the importance of preserving ‘face’, or honour, in Asia and quotes as an example the British manufacturer who took months to come to a decision about a military contract with a certain Southeast Asian government.

Finally, the directors of the British company attended a banquet with the government ministers responsible, and during a speech at the banquet, they abruptly announced they would not be going forward with the contract.

When the British executives left the banquet, the government minister came over to James and informed him that his government would never do business with that company again.

It was not the refusal of the contract that had upset him; it was the manner in which the news was conveyed. It had caused an unpardonable loss of face.

THERE’S A BETTER WAY

In societies that are more inclined towards the collective, where harmony, personal relationships, and respect are highly valued, such direct and ‘business only’ behaviour will not gain you many friends.

The British company would have been better advised to couch their non-participation in much more conciliatory language, to offer other benefits and ways in which to work, and to have chosen a private means of communicating this to the government rather than a public event.

In Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, if a personal relationship is broken, the entire business and cultural system on which it is based collapses.

DEVELOP YOUR OWN GHQ

That company may have developed advanced weaponry, but it lacked the GHQ capabilities—the interpersonal confidence and respect—to sell those weapons effectively.

These days both individuals and organisations have to develop their own GHQ, with at least some grasp of the different business, cultural, and legal systems that exist around the world.

And one of the essential drivers of a personal GHQ is to develop your cultural intelligence (CQ) or global mindset.

A high level of CQ allows you to be agile in different cultural settings or in response to new challenges.

These may come from a multicultural workforce with diverse backgrounds, generations and beliefs, a company’s expansion into new global markets, disruptive [...]